Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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the <strong>in</strong>scription, not the <strong>in</strong>scription itself. When a digital surrogate becomes available, I can po<strong>in</strong>t to
that. In the meantime, a way of standardiz<strong>in</strong>g references to parts of a work would be useful,” he added.
Other recent research has exam<strong>in</strong>ed some potential methods for resolv<strong>in</strong>g the issues of semantic
encod<strong>in</strong>g and l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g. Romanello (2008) proposed the use of microformats 174 and the CTS to provide
semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g between classics e-journals and the primary sources/canonical texts they referenced.
One of the first challenges was simply to detect the canonical references themselves, for as Romanello
demonstrated, references to ancient texts were often abridged, the abbreviations used for author and
work names varied greatly, only some citations <strong>in</strong>cluded the editors’ names, and the reference schemes
could differ (e.g., for Aeschylus Persae, variant citations <strong>in</strong>cluded A. Pers., Aesch. Pers., and Aeschyl.
Pers.). For this reason, Romanello et al. (2009a) explored the use of mach<strong>in</strong>e learn<strong>in</strong>g to extract
canonical references to primary classical sources from unstructured texts. Although references to
primary sources with<strong>in</strong> the secondary literature can vary greatly, as seen above, they noted that a
number of similar patterns could often be detected. They thus tra<strong>in</strong>ed conditional random fields (CRF)
to identify references to primary sources texts with<strong>in</strong> larger unstructured texts. CRF was a particularly
suitable algorithm because of its ability to consider a large number of token features when classify<strong>in</strong>g
tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g data as either “citations” or “not citations.” Prelim<strong>in</strong>ary results on a sample of 24 pages
achieved a precision of 81 percent and a recall of 94.1 percent. 175
Even when references are successfully identified, the challenges of encod<strong>in</strong>g and l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g rema<strong>in</strong>.
Romanello (2008) stated that most references to primary texts with<strong>in</strong> electronic secondary sources
were hard l<strong>in</strong>ked “through a tightly coupled l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g system” and were also rarely encoded <strong>in</strong> a
mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable format. Other obstacles to semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>cluded the lack of shared standards or
best practices <strong>in</strong> terms of encod<strong>in</strong>g primary references <strong>in</strong> most corpora served as XHTML documents
and the lack of common protocols to support <strong>in</strong>teroperability among different texts collections that
would allow the l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g of primary and secondary sources. To allow as much <strong>in</strong>teroperability as
possible, Romanello promoted us<strong>in</strong>g “a common protocol to access collections of texts and a shared
format to encode canonical references with<strong>in</strong> web onl<strong>in</strong>e resources” (Romanello 2008). The other
requirements of a semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g system were that it must be open ended, <strong>in</strong>teroperable, and
semantic- and language-neutral. Language-neutral and unique identifiers for authors and works (such
as those of the TLG) were also recommended to support cross-l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g across languages.
The basic system for semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g outl<strong>in</strong>ed by Romanello thus made use of the CTS URN scheme,
which uses the TLG Canon 176 of Greek authors for identifiers, a series of microformats that he
specifically developed to embed canonical references <strong>in</strong> HTML elements, and open protocols such as
the CTS text-retrieval protocol to retrieve either whole texts or parts of texts <strong>in</strong> order to support various
value-added services such as reference <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g. Romanello proposed three microformats for his
system: ctauthor (references to canonical authors, or statements that can be made mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable
through the CTS URN structure); ctwork (references to works without author names); and ctref—“a
compound microformat to encode a complete canonical reference” that requires the use of ctauthor,
ctwork; and a range property to specify the text sections that were referred to. While implementation of
such microformats encod<strong>in</strong>g and CTS protocols would enable a number of <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g value-added
services such as semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g, granular text retrieval, and cross-l<strong>in</strong>gual reference <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g (e.g.,
174 Accord<strong>in</strong>g to the microformats website, “microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon exist<strong>in</strong>g and widely adopted standards” that
have been designed to be both human and mach<strong>in</strong>e readable (http://microformats.org/about)
175 Work by Romanello cont<strong>in</strong>ues <strong>in</strong> this area through crefex (Canonical REFerences Extractor- http://code.google.com/p/crefex/) and was presented at the
Digital Classicist/ICS Work <strong>in</strong> Progress Sem<strong>in</strong>ar <strong>in</strong> July 2010. See Matteo Romanello, “Towards a Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Canonical
References.” http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2010-04mr.pdf
176 http://www.tlg.uci.edu/canon/fontsel